Your QSC Fall 2018 Newsletter
Queer Caucus
Carissim* Queerist*,
As a new Call for Papers season of AAIS begins, the Queer Studies Caucus organizing committee would like to take this time to keep you all updated on the state of the caucus. First, here’s a reminder of some of the AAIS deadlines for the upcoming conference this March:
December 1, 2018: Call for sessions and roundtables due.
Completed sessions and roundtables may also be sent at this time.
December 30, 2018: Proposals due to Session and Roundtable Organizers; these must include title, brief abstract (150-200 words), and short biographical blurb.
January 15, 2019: Completed sessions and roundtables must be submitted.
Unlike previous years, the organizing committee will not be taking the lead on putting together all of the QSC panels and roundtables. We are considering hosting a roundtable discussion about Queer Italy in a Transnational Frame (CFP to come), but we strongly recommend your input and would love to see some proposals for panels that best reflect your work and interests. We will be sponsoring a panel on queer studies and environmental studies/eco-criticism, “Queer Ecologies, Italian Style,” co-organized by Jonathan Mullins and AAIS Executive Secretary Monica Seger. That CFP is attached to this newsletter. Our caucus is meant to be a hub where we can network and reach out to one another as well as support each other’s intellectual and organizing efforts, so please do write to us if you’d like us to be the co-organizer or sponsor of a panel. We will, of course, as always, publicize and help connect scholars or co-organize in whatever ways we can. This brings us to perhaps the most important issue facing the Caucus in this moment.
Your organizing committee, SA Smythe, Julia Heim, and Sole Anatrone, have worked to keep this caucus going and visible for some time, by co-organizing sessions, roundtables, plenary speakers, and annual receptions or social events. As we’ve described at caucus business meetings, in previous newsletters, and info sessions, we have not held regular elections nor followed standard term limits due to our commitment to horizontal governance and how that has shaped our investment in the organization of the caucus. This being said, we do believe that it is time to pass the torch and get some fresh ideas and faces on our governing body. We have often asked who might be willing to help organize, but now we are really at a crossroads. While we wholeheartedly believe in this project and its importance, we cannot continue negotiating the present structures of AAIS and its annual meetings with the current levels of investment from our caucus members. Please know that any and all members who would like to move into these leadership positions will be met with our support and our guiding hands and we transition out of our current roles. If, however, no other members believe they have the time or energy to support the future of the Queer Studies Caucus in a leadership capacity, this will be its last year of active existence until someone else hopefully feels the need for it, as we did in 2012.
Finally, we would like to follow-up about the Caucus letter regarding the inclusivity committee proposed by the AAIS Executive Committee. As you know, we received a response from Valerio Ferme and some of our members have suggested one or more of us volunteer themselves to represent the Caucus on the committee (though we haven’t heard anything about when that might be getting off the ground). If you would like to be that volunteer please make yourself known and we will support you in any way we can. The issue of “diversity”--of thought, of embodiment, and otherwise--should be taken seriously and a robust conversation met with material change is something that we hope AAIS, Italian Studies, and all of us will commit to within the academy and certainly beyond.
In solidarity,
Your QSC organizing committee
CALL FOR PAPERS
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Queer Ecologies, Italian Style
This panel seeks to explore the intersections of queer and ecocritical Italian studies. Drawing on Catriona Mortimer Sandilands and Bruce Erickson’s claim that "there is an ongoing relationship between sex and nature that exists institutionally, discursively, scientifically, spatially, politically, poetically, and ethically," (2010) we welcome papers that track the imbrications of the natural and the sexual in Italian or Italophone cultural production. We are particularly interested in interventions cognizant of the overdeterminations that often mark the conceptual fields of sex and nature, and that seek to understand the convergences of the social, material and environmental as ecologies. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- urban ecology - migration and the environment - biopolitics - new materialism - non-reproductive futurities - queer and geological temporalities - animal studies - political movements and government policies - heterotopias - intersections of sex, race and ecology - toxic discourses and representations of purity - queer performance studies - the post-human - eco-queer activism and other coalitional politics
Please send a 200-300 word abstract, brief bio, and request for A/V to the session organizers by December 30th, 2018:
Jonathan Mullins - University of Southern California - mull...@usc.edu
Monica Seger - William & Mary - mjs...@wm.edu